Every enterprise should leverage even the slightest social media presence to strengthen and grow their brand even more.

Where to start? Here are 5 key social media marketing steps that you can rely on to grow your influence on social media.

1. Target The Right Audience On Social Media

A note: Every marketing team needs to know the difference between a target market and a target audience. These are different terms.

A target market includes all the people that might have intentions to buy your product or services. Whereas, the target audience are the people to whom your marketing team speaks directly with planned marketing strategies and campaigns. The target audience is part of the target market, but it’s specifically defined by user/customer persona.

And what is ‘user persona’ you ask?

A user persona is a fictitious character of your ideal customer. Even though it is made up, that character is built on a lot of research, surveys, and customer analysis.

The user persona is used to develop social media marketing strategies according to the characteristics of that persona, their habits, strengths, and weaknesses.

If you have some doubts about whether creating a User Persona is useful for your enterprise or not, consider this example:

Their ‘Invisible for Black and White’ deodorant campaign used this slogan: ‘White is Purity’. These words were understood as a racial language. It got the attention of every user on social media.

Even the wrong ones – support from all white supremacist groups.

Nivea got mentioned and pinged on social media, but not for a good cause.

If someone from the Nivea marketing team considered their user persona while creating this ad, this fiasco would probably never happen.

Even though the company didn’t advertise this campaign on social media, it turned out to be a big failure there.

If you gain the attention of one audience on social media but fail to engage with the other, does that count as a success? I wouldn’t say so.

Just like the Nivea example, you can build a solid reputation with one audience, but completely destroy the reputation with another one.

Targeting the right audience will assure that your marketing team is talking directly to the right audience. There is an easy way of doing this and it includes market research on your target audience or research on your competitors. Using this strategy your team will collect information about your customers and adapt the social media marketing strategies accordingly. This is the proper way of avoiding mistakes from happening in the first place.

2. Be Present On The Right Social Platforms For Your Business

Being actively present on all social media will suck the energy out of your marketing team. Sometimes, it’s better not to be present on some social media platforms for the cost of being present on others.

Every company should choose a few social platforms to be active on. And this choice needs to be based on your company’s target audience.

To do that, your social media marketing team needs to do simple research on what the benefits of using one specific social platform are, and how that platform can help increase your brand awareness.

Out of 2.6 billion social media users, your target audience is there somewhere, you just need to define what social media platforms they are most active on.

One question that may help your social media marketing team is ‘on what social platform does my target audience love to spend most of their time?’ That network, whether it is Facebook or LinkedIn, is the one that your users are checking daily while drinking their morning coffee, commuting to work, or while having a lunch break.

It may not always be only one social media platform, but without research, you won’t know.

Being active on the same social media platform as your target audience will increase the trust your audience puts in your brand, the credibility of your enterprise, and increase your overall brand recognition.

3. Invoke The Right Emotional Response From Your Audience

One way to build a successful enterprise is to pay attention to your users’ emotions.

Let’s take another look at the Nivea’s bad marketing strategy to make things more clear.

A large part of Nivea’s loyal users were disappointed by their bad marketing strategy.

Naturally, after the failure, many buyers found it difficult to trust the company again.

All users, whether online or offline, make their buying decisions based on emotions. That’s why your marketing team must adjust their efforts to users emotions and try to invoke only the good ones in buyers.

The catch is in the detail.

One such detail is the tone you use on different social media platforms.

You certainly won’t use the same tone to your users on LinkedIn and Facebook.

You need to be aware of emotions. They can be your strength, but also your weakness.

Triggering the right emotions in users will lead to sales, but triggering the wrong emotion will cost you the client, irreversibly.

Your marketing strategies need to be in line with users emotions. Sometimes the users will feel anger, sometimes relief, and sometimes the element of surprise will be the vital one. All of these emotions depend on your goals.

Again, being aware of the emotional stage of the user is what creates a successful enterprise.

4. Regularly Post Unique Content On Social Media

The challenge here is not in creating content regularly, but rather in avoiding to create something that is a duplicate.

If your marketing team is experienced, well-read and informed, creating a unique content won’t be a difficult thing to do. On the contrary.

But, having an army of marketers that will do all this manually may cost your business a lot.

And sometimes it’s not just about the money. The time they are going to spend doing this is more valuable.

What this implies is finding the best posting time according to your brand’s and user’s needs and post as much as you see it fit in that particular time.

After a certain period, your users will notice your consistency and they will know when to expect your next unique content.

5. Create a Social Media Tribe For Increased Brand Awareness

Finally, to achieve all of this you’ll need people. And who knows your product or services better than your employees?

Your employees are the ones that can help you create your social media tribe.

Let me explain why I mean by a social media tribe.

A social media tribe consists of the employees of one company doing activities on their personal social media accounts to increase the brand awareness of that company.

It’s one cost-effective and constructive way to achieve the company’s goals. It increases the engagements rates, the conversion rates, and brand awareness.

Like we already said, if you have 100 employees and they share the content on each of their social accounts ( let’s say 3), that’s 300 times shared content. That’s a lot of reached audience and a lot of increased engagement rates.

Every enterprise should encourage their employees in creating a social media tribe that will help increase the brand awareness of your enterprise.

What Can We Conclude From All Of This?

Let’s remind ourselves of the steps necessary to follow to increase brand awareness, traffic, number of leads and sales:

Be present on the same social media as your targeted audience

And create social media tribes to increase brand awareness

Create a user persona and target the right audience

Hit the right user’s emotions with your posts

Regularly posting unique content

Becoming an influential enterprise on social media is not something that is achieved overnight. Every person involved with your company has a significant role in achieving the company’s goals.

That’s why creating a social media tribe is such an effective marketing strategy.

The tribe has the company’s goal in the mind and every action they make is getting the company closer to success.

The benefits of doing these social media marketing steps are numerous:

Increased brand awareness

Being present on social media has its perks, especially in increasing your brand awareness among users. From your brand’s name to the mission, products/services, social media marketing is the key to success.

Increased social traffic and web traffic

The traffic your company is getting from a social platform is not to be underestimated. Most of your users are present on social media. And taking care of them will result in increasing your social traffic.

Increased number of qualified leads

Increased engagement rates on social media can increase the chances of gaining hot leads. One lead, if nurtured the right way, may turn into a loyal customer.

Increased number of sales

Ultimately, if everything of the above-mentioned is done right, your company will notice an increase in the sales department.

If you follow these steps you can over time become an influential enterprise and increase the brand awareness of your company.